Deepen Teacher Inquiry Series - Part 28

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. 

— Winston Churchill

The final phase of an inquiry is the evaluate phase. The phase in which teachers evaluate what they know about the impact of their inquiry on students learning. A place where they are collaborative, see trends and do the analysis.

During the evaluate phase teachers are involved in analysing and reflecting. To evaluate is to analyse and reflect.

A Story in Action

Kate wanted to know if having success criteria for each learning intention would impact student learning. She took for learning intentions from a unit of work and wrote specific success criteria.

Kate had two classes of the same year level and was able to use the success criteria with one class and the old version of the learning intentions with the other class. Kate's evidence for her inquiry involved a pre-test and a post-test in generating quantitative evidence.

Kate, in the process of analysing, had gone through a process of - scan | review | reflect - to identify trends and patterns. She "playfully processed" the evidence by calculating the class average and effect size for each class and each student. She graphed these trends to gain a better idea of what was happening regarding the learning. Once she had identified the trends and patterns, she realised that she was missing part of the picture.

Kate understood that more things were occurring with the students learning then was being shown by the quantitative evidence. There were outliers in the evidence that didn't make sense when she correlated back to what she knew about each of her students. It was at that point that Kate decided to collect qualitative evidence to triangulate against the quantitative evidence so she could gain a deeper understanding of the learning that was occurring.

Be collaborative | See Trends | Do Analysis

In the story above, Kate had looked for trends in her analysis - not just the obvious ones in order to triangulate her evidence. Here is why...

See Trends | Do Analysis

Triangulate the evidence to get a clear picture of what is happening. Look at the evidence in context to gain a greater understanding of what is happening with the learning process.

See trends and patterns. In analysing the data of an Inquiry, teachers are looking for trends and patterns in the data. Come at the analysis of evidence from multiple directions. Trends and patterns can be found or identified in many ways. Approach from many directions and levels of curiosity. During the analysing phase of a teacher Inquiry, it is essential for teachers to analyse the evidence in many ways.

Turn over every rock to gain a deeper understanding of what has happened regarding learning. It is important that teachers do more than just process the data.

Gaining an understanding of the patterns you see is essential. It is critical that teachers seek an understanding of any trends and patterns that they have found in their evidence. To "know thy impact".

Analyse you evidence in multiple ways. During the analysis phase, teachers reflect on the impacts the strategy has had on the learning of the students.

Scan | Review | Reflect

Teachers reflect through a process of scanning and reviewing the evidence that they have collected during their Inquiry. Explore to know the impact. New learning strategies - when formed through an inquiry - allow greater impacts for students. Through inquiry, teachers can identify impact.